Cops' Cleanup Turns Into Costly Mistake

BOSTON, May 12, 2006 — -- It was supposed to have been a bit of spring cleaning, but it resulted in a blunder a Somerville, Mass., police captain now calls "a serious error."

The police officers apparently had good intentions, but their inadvertent actions not only cost Somerville, which lies just north of Boston, thousands of dollars in drug evidence but may also have compromised some of its pending drug cases.

So what happened?

Two Somerville Police Department officers were assigned to clean out an old evidence room at the city's police headquarters -- that's exactly what they thought they were doing when they inadvertently threw away a dilapidated desk that contained more than $31,000 worth of evidence from past and pending criminal cases.

"We are embarassed. We have egg on our face, but we did this because we tried to make things better," said Somerville Police Capt. Michael Devereaux, who said that the department is taking full responsibility for the officers' actions.

''It was accidental," but the officers cleaning the evidence room ''should have been more careful than that," acting Somerville Police Chief Robert Bradley told the Boston Globe. ''It's just an embarrassment for the department."

The tidying officers discovered the old desk in the evidence room had been moved and tilted on its side, so they assumed it was part of a batch of other old office furniture that was being discarded. So, they threw it out on a city dump truck.

What they didn't know was that an evidence clerk -- who was not working that day -- had been using the desk to store some $31,535 in seized cash.

Devereaux said the two officers, one of whom is retired, are "mortified."

"He was doing a good job cleaning up," Devereaux said. "Unfortunately, he threw out a little too much."

After a detailed search of the desk's journey, it has been determined that the discarded desk -- still holding the thousands of dollars of cash evidence -- was ultimately taken from a waste transfer station outside Boston to a landfill in Rochester, N.H.